Day Five | Performativity and Flow

Day Five - Wed 8 June, 2016 | Performativity and Flow

Today was about Chief Curator Natalie King’s curatorial thinking, and how the discursive ideas of the lab might materialize within the commissions that are being developed for October.

It was a day of transitioning from an open research and site engagement phase into starting to think about the sharpening and focusing on the delivery of the proposal for next Thursday. It was two rivers coming together and trying to find a single stream that would flow from that.

The workshop with Gideon was about performativity and flow through the site and the space and people engaging in simple movement exercises that spoke to the idea of bodies and proximity in site. And decision making.

Operations and senior council staff also came in to talk about their roles and responsibilities. How artists could orient themselves in terms of the city and how the city runs. What artists might need to do or think about to develop requests of the city of Melbourne. Operationalising public art.

“Because a space is there, it has to be negotiated. My interest is in people and patterns. This idea that we move, and we move to a beat, and we are a group, and we become something larger than ourselves.” – Gideon Obarzanek

Movement workshop with Gideon Obarzanek. Illustration: Kenny Pittock

“This exercise was all about ‘growing movement’. We work together and the goal is to go as big as you can go until you can't be any bigger, then back again. The purpose is that when you grow the movement, you're allowing agency to grid from seemingly nothing.” – Hiromi Tango during the movement workshop in the market sheds